Engagement rate in Google Ads

Source: Google Ads Help, About engagements reporting.

What counts as an engagement depends on the format. For in-stream and Shorts video ads: 10 seconds of watching, the whole ad if shorter, or a click. For in-feed video ads: 10 seconds muted, or a click on the thumbnail. For bumper and non-skippable ads: a click. For Lightbox and Gmail ads: expanding the ad.

Search and Shopping ads record no engagements, so an account-wide rate depends on how much of the traffic runs on formats that do. Avg. CPE, cost per engagement, is its price.

Three engagement rates, three questions

Google Ads' rate asks whether people reacted to the ad. Google Analytics' engagement rate asks whether visits to the site were engaged: more than 10 seconds, two pages or more, or a key event. See GA4 engagement rate. Optizads' Engaged visits from ads asks the same as GA4, for visits from your Google ads only.

The three can move in opposite directions. A video that hooks viewers can raise the ad's engagement rate while sending visitors who leave the site at once.

A worked example

A bike maker runs a skippable video campaign. In June it has 120,000 impressions and 9,600 engagements, an 8% engagement rate. Its video views are lower, because a view needs 30 seconds and an engagement only 10.

Engaged visits from ads in Google Analytics reads 41% for the same month. The video holds attention for 10 seconds, but most of the visits it sends do not stay. The team reworks the landing page before it touches the video.

1. Open Campaigns, click the Columns icon, then Modify columns.
2. In Performance, tick Engagements, Engagement rate and Avg. CPE.
3. Read them on video, Lightbox or Gmail campaigns; Search rows stay empty.
4. Compare with Interactions and Interaction rate to see which action Google counted for each format.

Optizads reads Ad engagement rate as Google totals it, for the exact days you pick, kept for 30 minutes. When Google cannot be read, it divides the period's stored engagements by its impressions. Avg. CPE is read the same way, with a fallback that rebuilds the cost from each day's CPE times its engagements.

Engagements and Ad engagement rate sit in the Engagement group of the metric picker, Avg. CPE in Costs. The Google Analytics rates are elsewhere: Engagement rate in Site traffic, and Engaged visits from ads in Traffic, once Google Analytics is connected.

Put Ad engagement rate and Engaged visits from ads in one Key figures card. The reader sees in a glance whether the ad held attention and whether the visit did. With Google Analytics connected, Ask Oppy can draw the same card in the conversation.

• Comparing Google Ads' engagement rate with GA4's as if both measured the same thing.
• Reading an account-wide rate that includes Search impressions, which never record engagements.
• Calling an engagement a view: a view needs 30 seconds on skippable in-stream ads, an engagement 10.
• Judging a video on engagement rate alone, without what the visits did on the site.

• YouTube ads: Video ads shown on YouTube through Video, Demand Gen or Performance Max campaigns.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks divided by impressions: the share of people who saw an ad and clicked it.
• Engaged-view conversion: A conversion after someone watched at least 10 seconds of a video ad, or all of it if shorter, without clicking.

• Engagement rate (GA4): Engagement rate in Google Analytics 4 is the share of sessions that were engaged: engaged sessions divided by sessions.
• Interaction rate: Interaction rate is how often people interact with your ad once it is shown: interactions divided by impressions.
• Video view rate: Video view rate is the share of your video ad impressions that became views: views divided by impressions.